Gabriel Sechan wrote: >>>XML is overkill. It tries to swat a mosquito with a sledgehammer. It >>>takes a problem that can generally solved in minutes, and gives you hours >>>of fun debugging XML code. I have *never* seen a problem solved by XML >>>that couldn't have been done just as easily- if not more so- without it. >> >>And yet, somehow, nobody ever *did* solve the problems better or more >>easily. > > SUre we did. How else did anything get written before XML?
Stuff got written but it probably was not as useful due to other machines not being able to understand it. Look at HTML for example. Only useful for being rendered for human consumption. You can't take a page of html from weather.com containing a forecast and feed it into another program expecting to understand that it is weather data. > And there's damn good reasons for those binary formats- speed of parsing, > storage space, etc. Not being human readable is frequently a bonus too- > for every coder who goes in and hacks something cool of a human readable > file, 20 morons corrupt the file. Speed of parsing and storage space are worthy tradeoffs for making it human readable IMHO. It is also worth it to have 20 morons corrupt the file as long as SOMEONE in my organisation can go in there and hack something cool when we need it done. > I can read binary or non-XML text quite well. Just give me the format. I can't. And the problem is that Microsoft most likely will not give you the format. People have been asking nicely for years. > about as complex. If you were looking to make just whats needed, it > wouldn't be 1/10th as bad. But then you are using a domain specific system which is not nearly as useful in the general sense. You have guarenteed that the only thing that will ever read your weather forecast (for example) is weather software. Possibly even only weather software that you have written. -- Tracy R Reed http://copilotconsulting.com -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
